Cultural history Lubbock, Texas, USA
In the Blood: Wolves, Bats and Monsters at Texas Tech
A 2016 Texas Tech museum exhibition set the natural history of wolves and vampire bats beside the legends of werewolves and vampires — opening with a Monster Ball.
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It is a rare show that will hand you a vampire bat and a Dracula in the same breath and ask you to take both seriously. That was the premise of In the Blood, whose public opening was announced for the Museum of Texas Tech University in Lubbock on 30 October 2016. The museum's own description promised to set “science, history, legend, and popular and pulp fiction, all rolled into the one show” — the natural history of wolves and vampire bats on one hand, the mythology of werewolves and vampires on the other.
The pairing is the whole idea. A werewolf is, after all, a wolf wearing a man's history; a vampire's leathery relative actually exists and actually drinks blood. An exhibition that lets the real animal and the invented monster share a gallery is making a quiet argument about where our oldest fears come from.
The students' half of the room
In the Blood did not keep the theme to its curators. The museum invited Texas Tech students to answer it in their own media — paintings, mixed-media pieces, sculpture — and a student peer panel chose works for the main gallery, for a display scheduled from October through December 2016, each label naming its maker and, where offered, the maker's intent.
The opening weekend also promised a Monster Ball on October 29, the kind of event that lets a natural-history museum trade, for one night, on the glamour of the things it is otherwise dissecting.
Sources
Imagined exhibition setting; not the actual Texas Tech installation.
